Articles by Sara Feldman

Content 4.0 – The Next Wave of Content Experience

TechComm
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If you are a content professional or follow content industry trends, then you’ve probably heard a lot of buzzwords lately, including omnichannel content, Content 4.0, and microcontent.

The reality is that most of these buzzwords are different flavors of the same unstoppable trend. Consumer preferences are shaping the role of content to become more important than ever before.

Evolving the New Content Order

At LavaCon 2017, Cruce Saunders shared a forward-looking presentation about this new critical stage of content: content 4.o. He explained how to future-proof content assets to meet the demands of ever-evolving customer experiences.

Read more about themes from LavaCon 2017, or scan through Cruce’s presentation below.

Looking Forward

Content engineering practices and unified content models will help teams become more effective. As Cruce calls out in his presentation, “Our content must know more than what it looks like. It must know what it is and why it matters.”

Content interactions and intelligence are the path forward for organizations to become more customer-centric. Companies that don’t seize the opportunity to leverage content intelligence to provide more customer value will be disrupted by those that do.

Learn about the customer needs addressed by introducing smart content throughout the customer journey to differentiate your brand.

Originally published on the MindTouch.com blog

LavaCon 2017 – Spanning Silos and Evolution

TechComm
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It’s exciting to be part of LavaCon 2017. This conference has truly earned its reputation for being a go-to event for Content Strategists and TechComm enthusiasts. It’s no surprise that this year’s attendance is the highest ever!

The standout themes for Day 1 were all about embracing change and the evolution of content functions.

How do you keep up with constant change? Put your customers first and develop data-driven, scalable processes to continuously optimize for your customers.

Know Your Purpose

Day 1 began with a welcome from Jack Molisani, where he gave a specific call-to-action:

  1. Know your company’s mission statement (if you don’t know it, look it up … NOW).
  2. Consider your company’s mission statement in all your takeaways.
  3. Apply your takeaways as action items to support your company’s mission statement.

Knowing your purpose and where your role fits into your bigger company vision is critical. Aaron Fulkerson further explored how a modern content professional fits into organizational functions. Good news … content is more important than ever! Content Professionals need to be agents of change to ensure that content experience adapts to customer expectations.

Hoa (pronounced “Wah”) Aldous expanded on the theme of embracing change, and Andrea Zeller demoed some fun examples of how content is fueling new virtual reality experiences.

Span Silos

The afternoon breakout sessions offered practical methods for fulfilling this year’s LavaCon theme–Spanning Silos. Building these functional bridges in your organization happens in a few ways:

  • Customer Focus – Putting the customer first is easier said than done. Personalization and data-driven processes are key to ensuring that content meets your customer’s needs.
  • Scalability – Growing efficiently requires content that can scale effectively. Structured content is critical to making your content work for you and your customers.
  • Measurable Insights – Static content experiences will continue to become more obsolete. Dated content delivery (i.e., PDFs) doesn’t serve your customer’s objectives and can’t provide the content analytics you need to evolve.

Listen To Your Customers

Hopefully you’re already benefiting from direct customer engagement. If not, build a business case for why you need to listen to your customers. Fortunately, the closing sessions on Day 1 provided excellent fuel for a strong business case.

Jon Ann Lindsey shared some valuable lessons for how listening to customers helped a little company called Google improve their help content. Stefan Gentz presented some entertaining data about customer attention spans and how Adobe adapted their technical communication strategy.

Day 1 has been a great orientation for the hottest topics impacting content today, plus methods to propel effective content optimization going forward.

While Day 1 of LavaCon urged us to embrace change and prepare for the evolution of content, Day 2 focused more on strategic thinking to start taking action.

The morning of Day 2 began with keynote sessions that set a strong tone for the rest of the day:

  • Megan Gilhooly challenged us to Think Bigger and question some of our most common assumptions.
  • Eeshita Grover inspired a room full of introverts to realize that introverts make excellent leaders.
  • Melinda Howard Belcher walked through how to engage each functional team to work together towards the same experience-first content strategy.
  • Joe Gollner beamed-in to virtually introduce Content 4.0, a theme that appeared in other sessions throughout the day.

TechComm 4.0

The morning inspired attendees to question assumptions and prepare to expand into the voice revolution. These propelling themes continued throughout the midday breakout sessions.

Presentations focused on practical workflows to enable the conveyance of content delivery through organizations. DITA, intelligent content, Information 4.0, Content 4.0, and practical methods to span silos were covered in various sessions.

Ready for what’s next

The closing sessions on Day 2 provided more guidance for expanding content into the 4.0 reality.

Hannan Saltzman made it clear that in the coming years, even page one on Google won’t be good enough anymore–yet another assumption to reconsider. The massive increase in voice searches means that many users will likely only get an answer from the top spot. He also recommended that even gated content should become optimized for voice searches.

Keith Boyd declared this the year of the MOOC. He encouraged Content Strategists to explore further learning through the MOOC format, which is growing in popularity.

Cruce Saunders rounded out the day by talking through the newer modalities for how content will be published in the 4.0 information age.

This content originally appeared on the MindTouch.com blog: LavaCon 2017 Day 1 | LavaCon 2017 Day 2

Freelance Business Fundamentals – Key Takeaways

Career
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STC San Diego collaborates with SD/PEN every year to host a fall workshop. I think they keep getting better every year and this year’s workshop to Kickstart Your Home-Based Writing and Editing Business was my favorite by far.

The workshop included five expert-led presentations:

  1. Alex Bennett – Legal Basics
  2. Janina Goldberg – Time Management
  3. Martin Ceisel – Finding Clients and Copywriting
  4. Nikkie Achartz – Pricing and Profitability
  5. Allison Mellon – Digital Marketing Strategy

Top Takeaways

I have too many notes of action items and resources to list here, so I’m sharing my favorite takeaway from each session.

Legal Basics

Contracts can use overly-broad language to describe how the work you perform for your client becomes owned by them. Verbiage regarding intellectual property may say something like:

“… all processes, methodologies, inventions, enhancements, ideas, improvements, developments, modifications, derivative works, know-how, and trade secrets.”

That basically describes all-the-things! Agreeing to that type of all-encompassing language sets yourself up for risk, especially if you are pursuing personal projects or working with multiple clients at the same time.

To gain some control, first try to push back and ask for more specific contract language that describes the exact type of work you’ll be doing for the client. If they refuses to modify the language, then insist on itemizing other work to exclude.

Time Management

I asked for the cure to procrastination and learned a great tip! When you find yourself procrastinating for something important, write down the reasons you are delaying a given effort.

Forcing yourself to acknowledge why you are procrastinating identifies the root causes, which you can address more directly to give yourself the kick you need dive in.

Finding Clients

There is no excuse to not have a portfolio with at least a few quality examples of your work. Even if you are breaking into a new field, either as a new graduate or career-switcher, you have options to create a portfolio.

  • Create a Spec Ad (speculative advertisement, an ad you create on your own) or other samples just to demonstrate the specific skillset you need to highlight.
  • Volunteer for a professional association or community organization and offer your talents for something that helps them and your portfolio at the same time.
  • If your work is protected by an NDA or you don’t have permission from the intellectual property owner, create a scrubbed or modified version of the piece as an alternative.

No excuses!

Pricing and Profitability

When marketing yourself, focus on the reasons and motivations of your potential client. People are motivated to make decisions based on one of three things:

  1. Fear
  2. Pain
  3. Desire

Weave in specifics about how you can save the client time, money, aggravation, etc. If your proposal directly addresses the problem you work will solve and why you are the best person to solve it, it will be received better.

Digital Marketing Strategy

My favorite takeaway about digital marketing is something I already knew, but it’s worth repeating. Don’t over-focus on keywords for SEO gains when publishing marketing content. Search algorithms continue to evolve towards ranking based on searcher-intent and context rather than exactly matching keywords.

Google cares more about relevancy than other factors. Create content that is valuable for users—what I call effective content—and engagement will become your biggest SEO boost.

Event Follow-Up

To see parts of the workshop that were recorded, check out the YouTube playlist: 2017 Workshop – Freelance Business Fundamentals.

To be notified of future events with STC-San Diego, subscribe to the mailing list.

STC San Diego Workshop 2017

Top Content Experience Strategist 2017

Career
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It’s a great time to be a content professional. With changes in consumer behavior and advances in technology, content has a more important role than ever.

Sara Feldman Effective Content

This is a fun space to work in with tons of reasons to keep upping our content game:

  • Effective content fuels intent-based moments, which Google coined as Micro-Moments, where consumers seek information to make a decision (know, go, do, or buy).
  • Rapidly evolving smart devices and AI-powered conversational user interfaces are dependent on new formats of effective content.
  • New data about customer effort, which is heavily influenced by effective content, shows that reducing customer effort has the strongest measurable correlation to customer loyalty.

As Patrick Bosek called out in a recent easyDITA post, these trends in consumer behavior and new technology “demand content to properly interact with us.” I love how he phrased that.

Content Influencers and Strategists List

I’m pleased to be included on a 2017 list of Top 200 Content Experience Strategists and proud to see so many familiar names from my network included on the list too!

The Top 200, as described by MindTouch:

Nominated and voted on by you, the people, this list was simply too extensive and close to keep it confined to the TOP100 as originally anticipated. This list is 100% voted on by the public and offers insight into who the industry feels are implementing an incredible Content Experience through strategic and tactical use of their self-service materials, delivering best-in-class support for their current customers and prospects alike.

The Top 25, voted on by a panel of Content Experience leaders, is a stellar list of influencers to follow. Check out the full MindTouch list of 2017’s TOP25 Content Experience Influencers and TOP200 Strategists.

Content Expectations

Effective Content
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Does your content meet your own expectations? Mine doesn’t, yet.

“Be the content you wish you found!”

One of my favorite takeaways from attending #MozCon 2017 came from a candid preso by Wil Reynolds – I’d Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked.

Google’s AI is learning to favor content that most effectively fulfills the searcher’s intent. It’s more important than ever to be the right answer to the queries you seek to rank for and to be the content you wish you found.

Wil Reynolds MozCon 2017
Image credit: Adviso Blog

Effective content framework

I’m working on an #effectivecontent framework to help elevate my content to my own expectations. I’ll present the full strategy at the upcoming LavaCon, but here’s a sneak-peek at the five main components:

  1. Intent
  2. Usability
  3. Findability
  4. Timeliness
  5. Efficiency

I’ll be sharing more about it soon.

MozCon 2017 Takeaways

Effective Content
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I’ve been a technical writer and editor for 10+ years and never imagined I’d attend a content marketing conference. Then, just a couple months into a new role with SEO and lead-gen as an important part of my responsibilities, I was lucky enough to attend MozCon 2017.

I love that my career has focused on technical support content and online self-service because being good at my job helps my company and customers at the same time – that’s still true with my new focus.

I was excited to bring back new insights to my team, which would ultimately benefit our MindTouch customers too.

Sara Feldman at MozCon 2017

My notes of takeaways took up 8 typed pages, but I can summarize the information-dense week with two main themes.

Focus on intent

Google AI is trying to answer questions better and quicker. It’s more important than ever to be the content you wish you found and be the best answer to the queries you seek to rank for. If you’re not the right answer to the question, Google will 86 you.

Conversely, content that doesn’t guide users to the right answer is the most disruptable. Those are your easy-target opportunities. The best strategy is to attempt to understand user intent and deliver what they need, instead of playing SEO games.

Diversify

User behavior and adaptive technology is evolving rapidly, therefore you should operate as if your biggest lead-gen source(s) could disappear tomorrow. At the same time, it’s essential to be hyper aware of resources vs. reward for each of your channels and prioritize accordingly. Users are increasingly expecting personalized experiences AND they often have different expectations on different channels.

Staying agile (and successful) requires constant testing, measuring, and tweaking. Experiment with different media types and delivery methods and don’t be afraid to take risks or be bold.

Copyright © 2024 Sara Feldman. All rights reserved.